Caroline Glick: Pope Francis’s unfriendly visit

Caroline Glick devotes a column to “Pope Francis’s unfriendly visit” to Israel. She makes a number of points that seem persuasive to me. Caroline discusses the Pope’s stop for a photo opportunity at a portion of the security wall separating Israel from the Palestinian Authority, commenting in part as follows:

Reasonable people disagree about the contribution the security fence makes to the security of Israelis. But no one can reasonably doubt that it was built to protect Israelis from Palestinian terrorist murderers. And Francis ought to know this. Francis’s decision to hold a photo-op at the security barrier was an act of extreme hostility against Israel and the Jewish people.

As the former Cardinal of Buenos Aires, Francis may have heard of the November 2002 massacre at Kibbutz Metzer. Metzer was founded by Argentine communists in the 1950s. Metzer is located 500 meters from the 1949 armistice lines which made it an obvious beneficiary of the security fence. But true to its radical roots, in 2002 members of the kibbutz waged a public campaign against the planned route of the security fence. They feared that it would, in the words of Metzer member Danny Dovrat, “ignite hostility and create problems” with the kibbutz’s Palestinian neighbors.

Thanks to that concern, on the night of November 10, 2002, a gunman from the “moderate” US- and EU-supported Fatah terror organization faced no physical obstacle when he entered the kibbutz. Once there he killed two people on the street and then entered the home of Revital Ohayon and executed Revital and her two sons, Matan, 5, and Noam, 4 years old.

Fatah praised the attack on its website and pledged to conduct more assaults on “Zionist colonizers,” and promised to continue “targeting their children as well.”

Had he actually cared about the cause of peace and non-violence he claims to champion, Francis might have averred from stopping at the barrier, recognizing that doing so would defile the memory of the Ohayons and of hundreds of other Israeli Jewish families who were destroyed by Palestinian bloodlust and anti-Semitic depravity.

Instead, Francis “spontaneously” got out of his popemobile, walked over to a section of the barrier, and reverentially touched it and kissed it as if it were the Wailing Wall….

Caroline is disappointed and angry, but is she wrong? Tom Gross also comments on the Pope’s photos at the security wall here. Gross notes: “[N]one of the Western media I have seen have drawn attention to the exact spot that the Pope chose to pray: in front of large graffiti comparing Bethlehem to the Warsaw Ghetto.”

I haven’t seen comments on the photos beyond those of Glick and Gross. At the least attention must be paid and eyes unaverted.